The Journey to Writing a Successful Story: a tip book

Dealing With Jealousy

You're a new author on Wattpad. Or maybe you've been on Wattpad for quite sometime. You're writing stories, may have a couple that are already completed. Maybe they're novels, maybe they're short stories, or poems.

At first, you may feel accomplished. At first, you may feel like you're an amazing author. But then as you're scrolling through the many stories on Wattpad, you find books with millions of views and feedback. You find books that are popular and crappy. Books that are overly cliche, have been told probably thousands of times. Books that have no real characters, stereotypical. Books that have bad grammar, punctuation, spelling.

Your mind is blown at the fact that these God awful stories are famous among Wattpad readers. You're probably thinking, "How did they do it?" Because in your mind, you can't see people liking such a story, such a tragedy.

And maybe, just maybe, you end up with your heart ripping to pieces, falling into the dark pit of your stomach. Why?

Because you're jealous.

You may write better than they do. You may have a better and more original idea than they do. You may write with such precision that there is no crack in your story; no hole that deepens to the ocean's abyss, allowing the earth to forget about it. And yet, you still find yourself struggling to find readers that will enjoy this story of yours.

You're probably overthinking by now. What if my story isn't great, not what I thought it would be? What am I doing wrong? Should I make a badly written cliche to try and get noticed? Should I quit writing all together?

Questions like these pound the walls of your mind over and over again, making you drown in them. You're unable to fathom what life would be like if your story got put on the shelf at a bookstore, what life would be like if your book turned into a movie, what life would be like if your story got over five million views on here. You'd probably jump around, ecstatic, if it truly happened. But you feel as though it would and could never happen, because you aren't making something like those badly written stories.

And you're still full of jealousy; you've been trying to get rid of it, but you can't find a way out of it.

How can you recover from this?

You can't, honestly. You will always find a book that may be more famous than yours, even if it's badly written. You will always find a book that is better than yours, even if you don't think so. You will always find jealousy throughout those stories that are either more famous and or are better.

If you come across a famous, bad written story, just ignore it. Find something else that may catch your attention.

If you're wandering around, try to get people to look at your story by making it seem so interesting as you talk about it. How great it's written, how great the plot is...

Be happy for the readers you do have. Be happy for theirs, too. They may have a badly written book, but it's amazing to see so many people fall in love with it. So compliment them on how far they've gotten. Don't get into silly arguments over people like a story. And finally, do your best with writing. She may not make an effort, but readers who see that the writer is making one, they will fall for it.